Month: February 2014

Microsoft SkyDrive is the area of cloud storage used by Office to store their documents. You can save your PowerPoint presentation in SkyDrive to make it accessible wherever you are. Provided you have an internet connection you can connect to SkyDrive and work on your presentation regardless of your location. This is much more convenient than storing the file on a USB stick and having to carry it around with you, or emailing the presentation to yourself.

To use SkyDrive with PowerPoint 2013 you must first sign in. On opening PowerPoint, you’ve probably seen the nagging reminder to sign in in the top right hand corner of Backstage View.

Click on the link and you’ll commence the sign in process, starting with this screen. Just enter your log on credentials.

Why Microsoft can’t provide a conventional sign in screen on which you enter both user name and password together is beyond me! Instead, you type in your email address on the first screen and then progress to the next screen where you type in your password. Duh.

Once you’ve signed in, you will see your name and avatar in the top right corner of the workspace. And now that you are signed in, you have access to your SkyDrive and all the documents stored there.

Let’s store a presentation in SkyDrive now: make sure you have a presentation open and click the File tab > Save As. You should see a screen that displays your SkyDrive, like this:

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Ensure that your SkyDrive is selected on the left, and then click Browse. Ordinarily, the Browse button would allow you to navigate among the drives and folders on your computer. However, because you have SkyDrive selected, you navigate among the SkyDrive folders.

The folder/file concept used in SkyDrive is the same as that used on your hard drive, but notice the file path defaulted into the Save As dialog box. Weird huh? It looks like a URL – and that’s exactly what it is. You could copy the url displayed here, paste it into the address bar of your internet browser and explore SkyDrive using your browser. Moving on: navigate to the location in SkyDrive where you want to save your presentation and click Save.

Now, wherever you are working, whether at home, at work or at a friend’s house, you can work on your presentations.

SkyDrive is Microsoft’s “cloud”; online storage where you can store your Office documents and access them anywhere. By default, when you press ctrl + s to save a new presentation, you are presented with Backstage View, where SkyDrive is just one possible place to which you can save.

Here you get to choose what type of location to save your presentation to: whether it’s somewhere in SkyDrive, on your computer’s hard drive, or another new location. However, some people will only save documents to their own computer, so this needless extra screen will quickly become a nuisance. People who work in an office environment often work on a network and share documents using that network. SkyDrive is irrelevant and redundant to them.

How To Disable SkyDrive

Fortunately, there is a quick and easy way to disable the save to SkyDrive option if you decide you don’t need it.

Click the File tab > Save:

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Near the top you’ll see a checkbox for “Don’t show the Backstage when opening or saving files“: check that box. Now when you ctrl + s on a new presentation, you will be presented with the familiar Save As dialog window.

Click to enlarge

If you want to really speed up your save operation when you find yourself saving to the same location time after time, you can amend the Default local file location value (see image above) to be that location. Then, when you ctrl + s, the Save As dialog will open at that location. All you have to do is name the presentation and click Save.